xxvii, 384 pages : 25 cm

"What makes some warriors perform extraordinary deeds on the battlefield? For this study of courage, fame and their consequences, Max Hastings has chosen fourteen men and one woman whose lives illustrate a wide variety of battlefield experience by land, sea and air in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some of his subjects succeeded triumphantly, others failed. Some found happiness and fulfilment in battle, others only melancholy. All their stories are fascinating. There is Bonaparte's exuberant cavalry officer Baron Marbot, and Harry Smith of the Rifle Brigade whose 14-year-old Spanish wife Juana followed him through Wellington's campaigns to Waterloo. Maine college professor Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain became one of the famous soldiers of the American Civil War. Engineer John Chard commanded the British garrison in its epic defence against the Zulus at Rorke's Drift in 1879. Other portraits include Eddie Rickenbacker, most successful American air ace of World War I, and Wing-Commander Guy Gibson, the RAF's legendary 'dam buster' who won his nation's admiration, yet few friends. Captain Karl Friedrich Muller commanded the German raiding cruiser Emden in World War I, while in modern times John Paul Vann became a symbol of America's tragedy in Vietnam, and Colonel Avigdor Kahalani was among Israel's outstanding tank commanders of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Warriors is a study of human behaviour, rather than military tactics; its gallery of striking - sometimes startling - portraits will fascinate any reader who wishes to contrast the romance and the reality of battle."--BOOK JACKET

Includes bibliographical references (pages 371-374) and index

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